A day out with the Big Boy

Today was my first official day of maternity leave, and even though I'm keeping the boys in daycare until the end of the month, I decided to take Colin out today for a special day on the town with Mama.

We hit some of our favourite spots, and a few new ones. First, we went to the dentist, which was the real reason Colin was out of daycare for the day. Thankfully, he was cavity free, although the dentist broke the news to me that he'll need some corrective work when he turns six as a result of all the thumb sucking (sigh).

Afterwards, as a reward, we went shopping at the Italian Centre for new pasta shapes. We found stars, alphabets, and rainbow pasta—true rainbow pasta, where there's a full rainbow on each piece of farfalle. Then we refuelled at Spinelli's café with chocolate biscotti and pain au chocolate (don't tell the dentist!). Finally, we headed over to the Telus World of Science to tour the "Body Worlds" exhibit. 

I must confess, I had some misgivings about taking my four year old to an exhibition of plastinized human corpses, but he's really into that kind of stuff. He's fascinated by the human body and how it works. He loves books about "scary" things: vampires, ghosts, monsters, etc. And he's going through a real morbid phase right now where every day he asks us about death and dying and which member of our family is probably going to die first. (Eek!) 

I'm trying not to read too much into this. I figure it's just a developmental stage where he's trying to understand our world and how it works. And I try to be as honest as I can with him, without telling him  too much so that he's frightened. The Body Worlds exhibit turned out to be the perfect place to address some of these things. He understood that the figures we were seeing had once been people, but they were just bodies now. Mostly he was fascinated by a video of a heart attack and wanted to watch it over and over and over again (great object lesson in why he needs to eat healthy foods). But finally he said, "Mama, this makes me think about death and dying." So we left and headed to the play area where he could fly an airplane and do more kid-appropriate things.

Because of our whirl-wind day, Colin missed his nap. So about 5:00 p.m. he crashed in the living room. A good end to a good day.